Mo Wilde (2022) The Wilderness Cure. Ancient Wisdom in a Modern World.

I tried to remember. Names in which the subject describe the object. Mo Wilde and Wilderness cure. In real life, we call these coincidences aptronyms. A tutor of Creative Writing I once had was, for example, called Elizabeth Reeder. Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer is another example. Oscar Wilde’s (no relation to Mo Wilde) The Importance of Being Ernest played with that idea. A charactonym, loaded  labels with hidden meaning, designed to tell you exactly who a character is before they even speak. Everything is someone.

Wilde is wild and lives in the wilds of Scotland in a specially built hut. She’s not off-grid. Wilde is 57 when her experiment with eating only things she could forage, which includes meat and fish—which she uses her car for and friends can also donate food. This was during the Covid years. And she was 58 when it finished. As  you’d expect after living off the flora, fungi, seaweeds, and wild game of the Scottish landscape, slimmer, better and more attuned to our world.  

In family folklore, my da, Dessy, making a pot of soup with nettles, was a mark of his eccentricity. My sisters gabled on about how boufing it was and full of flies and midges. Nonsense, of course. But uneatable is probably true.

Wilde has no such problems. She was and is a semi-professional forager who gives workshops and guides her followers which plants to pick and suggest what properties they have. Naturally, she combines this with advice about health and makes elixirs. Step back a generation or two and she’d have been burnt at the stake as a witch or wise woman.  

  I found her Diary musings interesting. We’re not that far off being the same age. We can remember a time before mobile phones. And children expecting to do better than their parents. She looks at the January 2021 figures from The Office of National Statistics, for example, and notices a trend.

‘Latest life expectancy figures show the slowdown in improvement since 2011’.

Glasgow gets a mention. We’re top of being bottom. Life expectancy for men is 54.6 years of living and, if we’re lucky, 23.7 years of poor health. That pleases me. I’m already ahead of the game. Poor and in poor health.

Women live slightly longer and more miserable lives.

Wilde blames diet. Her experiment began on Black Friday.  If that’s a surprise you’re reading the wrong book. Sugar in particular. Ultra- Processed Foods. Kids not getting enough exercise.  The obesity epidemic.

Ah, you might say. We’ve already solved that one by having less kids. Our population is falling and ageing. Soon a third of us (babyboom population will be over retirement age). More people die than are born. That’s also a trend, like global warming, in prosperous countries.

Mo Wilde can’t solve those structural problems.  Look within she asks, but also have compassion on yourself and others. Tread lightly on the planet we’re destroying and making uninhabitable for humans and all other species. That’s really her message. It’s hard to argue against. But those that do wouldn’t pick up a book like this, much less praise it. Read on.